Training - Talking - Teaching - Presenting

I went on a Labview computer course in Newbury, England recently, which proved very expensive, necessitated taking three days off work, and involved more train-changing and taxi-hailing than I would have imagined. The reason for this lengthy excursion was to help me overcome a particular set of obstacles confronting our current test programme. When I returned to work, one of my colleagues asked me, reasonably enough, how the course had gone. My reply was: 'I'll tell you at the end of the week.'

Maybe I could have been less enigmatic, but it was a logical answer – the course is only useful to me, and worthy of the effort and the expense, if it enables me to do what I need to do. If it doesn't, then it has been a waste of time. And this same criterion, or something close to it, can be applied to a presentation. A presentation cannot be said to have been good – no matter how classy the presenter appeared to be – unless it enables the audience to do something that they couldn't do before.

But contrast this with a presentation competition I am attending next week. Students from all over the country will be presenting their work in bid to win a substantial cash prize and a prestigious CV-enhancing award from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. When all presentations have been made, the judges will retire for ten minutes to choose a winner. They won't need to wait until the end of the following week to do so, and yet, what will their decision be based on?

Presentation competitions are a bit of an absurdity. Insofar as they encourage young people to think about the process of making a presentation, they are a good thing – and I will be helping the two competitors from this University as much as I can – but they are, in effect, impossible to judge.

Unless the judges have a need that is, or is not, being fulfilled by the presenter, then how can they say that the presentation has been successful. It would be like you sitting in on ten minutes of my Labview course (if you could bear it) and pronouncing that the trainer was speaking too fast, or flailing his arms about too much, or not moving around enough, or relying too much on jargon, or relying too little on Powerpoint. He may have done these things – and all can be detrimental – but in regard to whether the course has been useful or not, surely only I can decide.

The response I gave to my colleague was a bit trite; I don’t really have to wait a week to say if the course has been good or not. There is a set of documented course objectives (of the sort: 'at the end of this course, you will be able to…') and I can simply consider if these have been met. But I can only make an appraisal by examining these goals. Without them, what am I left to appraise?

Many of you may say: 'But surely this is an example of training, not presenting.' True, but this is an unimportant and an unhelpful distinction. The goal should come first, and the method to achieve this goal (or even the label you give to this method: presenting, training, teaching, tutoring, talking) is secondary.

Indeed, it is one of the biggest faults of many lecturers to believe that they should be talking at all times for teaching to be taking place. In fact, learning is the only important outcome of a lecture – an activity of the students, not the lecturer – and this can benefit greatly from bouts of non-teaching and non-presenting, such as: exercises, discussions, group work, dialogue, discourse and debate.

The point here, as I have stated many times before, is that the aim comes first. The presentation is only a means for achieving this aim. It reminds me of the saying, "You learn karate, so that you don’t have to use it." The most important thing to learn about making presentations is when to use them, and when not to. It can detrimental to focus too much on presentation skills. Presentation aim is far more important, and when you have a clear take on this, many of the so-called skills – body language, speaking style, enthusiasm – take care of themselves.